Episode 10 – Abby Hehemann on the Power of Customer Insights and AI in Modern Marketing

Fatima Rangwala (01:25) Hey, everyone! You already know that personalization has always been a tenet of marketing and sales. A tailored campaign always outperforms a generic spray and pray effort. But let's be honest. Personalization can be time consuming and challenging. And what if there is a way to take it even further and hyper personalize your email outreach using generative AI without losing the essential human touch, especially in today's world of startups and established firms.

Those are precisely the talk points for today. We are unboxing GetResponse, a leading email marketing platform with a staggering 350,000 customers in 182 countries. Their platform engages over 1 billion subscribers every month.

Joining us is Abby Hehemann, the Global Marketing Director at GetResponse. Abby specializes in product positioning, value driven messaging, go-to-market strategy, and has a decade of experience in SaaS marketing. She's on a mission to empower marketers and business owners with the tools and insights they need to grow, engage, and convert their audience for long-term relations and ROI.

I'm your host, Fatima, Strategic Content Head at Martech Cube. And let's dive in and hear from Abby herself.

Fatima Rangwala (01:28) Welcome to MarTech Cube, Abby.

Abby Hehemann (01:32) Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Fatima Rangwala (01:52) Great. Yeah. And it's a pleasure to have you join us today. So, Abby, before we dive into, you know, the meat of talking about email marketing and, um, you know, just the entire stuff that's happening with GetResponse. Um, why don't you just give us a background about yourself? What have you been up to? What's inspired, you know, your interest in product marketing in particular?

Abby Hehemann (03:14) Certainly. And I can say that my interest is in product marketing, but probably a lot of product marketers who are around in my stage of my career, but they, probably did not plan to go into product marketing. There was no product marketing class when I was going to university. This really evolved naturally from my role in customer success, where I first got started my career, and I'm from the United States, from the Southern State of Arkansas, and I actually moved to Poland in 2012. I was fresh out of graduate school, and I was honestly looking for any English speaking role, since I also did not speak any Polish. And I came across a position at GetResponse, an email marketing company, and I joined as a Customer Success Representative. So I started having many, many conversations with customers on the telephone, via email, on chats even. And I gained really deep, valuable insights about customers, about SaaS platforms and products, how customers are using marketing technology, how they're using our technology.

And that was really the jumping off point that I myself and think many product marketers actually have taken in. Just starting to work into product marketing is with this foundation of customer insights, customer needs and knowing and product inside and out. So that's really how I got here. And it was a very happy accident. And I'm super grateful that fate kind of landed me in this particular path of my journey.

Fatima Rangwala (03:16) Okay. And that's awesome. And that's quite a transition, actually, from, you know, coming from U.S., all the way to Arkansas, Poland. And it must have been a big change for you. So how are you finding it so far in Poland? How was the climate and everything?

Abby Hehemann (04:45) I love it, I really love it. I actually visited my home state of Arkansas a couple of weeks ago, and there were tornadoes everywhere, and it was just such an intense, dramatic weather experience that I recall from my childhood, making me so nervous and scared. And so I can certainly say that while I do at times complain that it's June here in Poland and I'm wearing a jacket and long pants. I'm thankfully not sheltering in a basement or under a mattress from tornadoes, so I can certainly say the the mild climate is something I enjoy. But in all seriousness, I really think that it has been such an amazing opportunity to get a lot of professional experience working with an international, uh, with an international like company, with my colleagues to not just work with one certain type of people, you know, from Arkansas, serving Arkansas clients, for example, really small. My worldview, both in my personal professional life, is much larger than I ever imagined. I think that's very much to my own benefit.

And then the benefit that I'm able to provide both our customers and other employers and companies that I'm working with because it's just a much larger, I would say, data set that I have to work with in terms of different types of people.

Fatima Rangwala (05:12) Yeah. And um, yeah. So then I think when, when we speak about your early roles, as you mentioned, you know, you have actually not started with product marketing and you've transitioned from customer success all the way to product marketing. And it's been quite a journey. Um, I'm definitely, definitely sure that there must have been challenges. Any specific challenge that you faced while you were going through this transition, and how have you overcome that?

Abby Hehemann (05:13) Certainly, I think one big mind shift challenge you have to go through is the concept of reactive versus proactive. Often traditional customer success roles, and one I was certainly working in are quite reactive, right. You are reacting to customers contacting you with problems, and then you are then helping them find those solutions. And what I'm seeing in the transition into product marketing is it's much more proactive, forward thinking approach to anticipate the problems that your customers may be encountering, not only in your product, but also in their day to day jobs, in their day to day lives. Depending on what area your product is addressing is you have to be forward thinking and in advance thinking about the roadblocks that you want for your product and service to be able to help them overcome. And don't wait for customers to surface those for you. And that was the biggest change that I had to get used to. And that is a challenge for most folks, right? Who are looking to scale their impact is to not just focus on, you know, individual reactivity in a moment, but to be thinking for a large group of individuals in the future, what are their problems going to be, and how can I surface solutions for them when they need it and not wait for them to come?

Fatima Rangwala (06:26) Exactly. Exactly one that's so well put up. And personalization is exactly what we mentioned in the start of the episode. And your experience is a great vouch, you know, for GetResponse as a company. And that's exactly where I'm getting at with my next, um, next question, which is, you know, so it's all about, you know, um, GetResponse coming from a journey of email autoresponder to a multi-channel marketing automation platform. And how has it been mirroring the evolution in the SaaS industry now that you're working for GetResponse? And it's a huge firm, they've established quite a lot of, you know, name and numbers in the market. And what are the problems that have been, you know, going on at GetResponse and how did you fit in and plug in to resolve that kind of a change for the company?

Abby Hehemann (07:20) Sure. Right. And back in the late 90s, when, when GetResponse was getting started and bringing the first auto responder to market, that was that was the business need that, you know, the problem that our founder was looking to solve for, right, was kind of a growing digital world, internet world, people finding their customers not with physical shops on the street, but actually, you know, in digital marketplaces. But then there was a problem with being able to keep up with the digital communication of all your new customers. And what if we could automatically make our customers feel welcomed, make them feel that there's a personal touch every time they leave their email address in a form, for example, on my shop. And so that auto responder was what helped, you know, that first stepping stone into automated personalization, things that help small business owners who don't have, you know, large teams to be able to still help their customers feel valued, feel like, hey, I got an immediate response to this input that I did, whether it was a purchase or a form fill.

But so the challenge with, with any, with any business, right, with any SaaS company, though, is to continue to anticipate those next futuristic challenges that our modern customers are facing. Right. So it's then that our customers are not just operating out of their email inboxes, sitting at their desks, they're putting their email inboxes in their pockets with their phones, their text messaging. They're expecting, you know, text messages from the organizations that they're doing business with. They're wanting to join digital meetings and get taught how to do things by some of their, you know, digital providers. So the challenge is, like anything, being able to be future enough, thinking both in terms of what your customers are going to actually need problem solved for, but also where you see the wider industry going. Anticipate those things and hope you're making the right bets with where you choose to invest in your product to better serve your customers so that they're ready for what their customers are expecting of them. Right. So it's this, you know, I really admire, uh, the bravery, I would say, of a lot of SaaS founders who really stake a lot in their bet. It's so much I feel like like gambling, right, that you're just making a bet, an educated guess based on where you think the market is going and there's going to be enough addressable market that's going to find value in your solution. But it's a bet you have to be forward thinking. And that's just the big challenge, is to make the right enough of the right bets, enough of the time to to keep going. And thankfully GetResponse has been doing that since the late 90s.

Fatima Rangwala (09:55) That's awesome, I think. Very cool. And I love your breakdown. You know, about, um, you know, about just shooting in the dark rather. We got to go a long way with that. And how do you blend data competency? How is the role of creativity to develop that kind of compelling value content or value stories and have scalable motions in terms of product marketing strategies?

Abby Hehemann (10:22) Yeah, and data stories is such a really great and descriptive term, I feel like with what should be our expectation of data, because it's so easy to go too far in one direction, either making a lot of gut decisions based not on data, but on feeling, but then to also get so bogged down in minute metrics that don't actually tell a story, they just distract you. And so that really is the challenge is to be able to find the right pieces of data that tell the right story for the right problem that you should be looking to solve for. So thankfully, there's a lot of really great tools out there. We, for example, use amplitude at GetResponse in our product marketing and product development organizations to help us start to build and visualize some of these data stories about how our customers use our product and the success or value that that drives for them. Or maybe to disprove a particular hypothesis that we may have or prove it right. Like we all had a lot of thinking assumptions about the way that our customers might use AI. And it turned out through data stories and visualization that we were totally off with the way that we expected our customers to use some of the AI solutions we were providing them.

They were providing value, but in a way we didn't anticipate. That's what we really need a lot in product marketing is to be able to visualize and tell the right types of stories and also prove or disprove some hypotheses that we had to help us make better decisions in the future about how we're going to serve our, our audience, whether with the content that we're helping to educate them with, or whether with the products that we're developing for them. So definitely with visualization is super important. Not just staring at crazy Excel spreadsheets full of numbers is incredibly important. I think that really helps it. And then to use it to surface those types of insights that ensure that you're not just all operating off of assumptions that it is based on the actual reality of how your users are using or not using your product has been really helpful for us.

Fatima Rangwala (12:21) Yeah. And is there any difference when these observations are being implemented? The tools that GetResponse has, or your kind of skills to align with between navigating the marketing world in startups versus something like an established firm, for example, GetResponse itself.

Abby Hehemann (12:43) Sure

Fatima Rangwala (12:44) Is there any difference between both of this?

Abby Hehemann (12:45) I would say the primary difference I've seen is that the benefit of working with a company that's been around for longer, like GetResponse, is you have a lot of historical benchmarks. I can look back at 10-15 years worth of data to be able to see the evolution of our business, of our business rhythms, and be able to kind gut check myself a little bit on is this normal, is this seasonal? But in a startup, often you don't have that type of historical data. You don't, basically, you don't know if this is seasonal, this is normal for your users, those types of things. So you have to, in a startup, be more comfortable operating without that, right. You don't have that benefit of a lot of historical data, trends, knowledge of folks who've been around for a long time to be able to set you right. So there definitely is quite a big difference in that. And then there's a difference in a lot of your teams. At GetResponse, we hire, we can have dedicated specialists for very specific, sometimes bespoke aspects of our marketing and what we need absolute experts in. But in the earlier days of a marketing organization at a startup, it's a swiss army knife approach, for lack of a better term. You have to be pretty good at quite a few things to be able to get things up off of the ground and get it running before you can really start to specialize. In my experience, and I see value in both. I think it's fun to have worked in both, and I think it's cool for people to kind of see what they like in terms of being a supreme specialist in one particular area or being good at quite a few things at one time. So that's another kind of marketing departmental difference I've seen between a startup and established company.

Fatima Rangwala (14:24) Yeah, that can be quite a challenge for startups. And also I think lack of infrastructure or funds or resources could actually be a stagger, you know, for startups. So that way I think the established firms make quite a mark there.

Abby Hehemann (14:43) Yeah, that's right.

Fatima Rangwala (14:44) Okay, so, yeah, Abby, earlier this year we had the opportunity to interview you on Martech Cube, you know, and that's when, you know, we, we had a little bit chat around humanization, you know, creating a connection and, you know, having the humanized touch to a brand for all our customers. And when you discuss your human approach to marketing in the B2B sphere, also of course, leveraging the AI, how are you differentiating the offerings through probably unique positioning that resonates with the customers? And how is the future outlook of AI in product marketing, especially with the human approach and the humanization involved? You know, we need to keep that a little stable, so.

Abby Hehemann (15:40) That's right. Yeah, it's essential. It's even more essential than it ever was. And it's always been important to feel like a human, that you're engaging with a human in this marketing, right? That we are, even though we represent businesses and B2B, for example, we are still businesses and we are still humans that work for those businesses, right, that are trying to make a good decision, a good investment for this business, but we're dealing with another human on the other side of it who's trying to sell us that. I mean, it's just so bizarre, you know, when we think about wanting to completely remove the human aspects of these things, when we are just all flawed, regular, normal humans trying to do the best that they can do in their job. And also for the once you are going to over lean into kind of AI content creation without any personalization, it's just super obvious and super boring. I think whenever you can just tell, we can all already sense this was all generated by GPT. It's so cool. After a year, barely a year, we all can recognize, ah, this is just generated by ChatGPT.

We recognize it, which is cool.

Fatima Rangwala (17:00) I know, I think we just recognize through the lingo that it just keeps generating monotonous dialogs and it just is not got any human touch to it. So exactly are there particular words that we can understand that through?

Abby Hehemann (17:00) That's right. So what we're trying to do is again, leverage not just the content creation, but some of the data analysis capabilities that some like Chat GPT plugins with Excel have done. So that's where we can use some advanced prompting within our team and within Excel, using the AI model to help us make some, to help us tell more data stories, to help us analyze sets of data in different ways that we haven't been able to before, to then let us spend that time, would have been spent hours and hours with some of our like, you know, folks who can write really complex SQL codes. Now we can use do our own prompting in Excel to get at some of this data in such a creative way that's a ton of time saved that we can think about what is a way to do something that's more unique, that's more creative, that stands out. It's like getting back, I feel like we're going, while we're scared about where marketing is going with AI, this is actually allowing us to go full circle back to what made marketing special at the beginning and what the essence of marketing is, which is telling creative, emotional stories.

And we should be leveraging AI tools that give us the freedom to do that. There was something trending I saw on LinkedIn, like over the weekend. Somebody wrote, I don't want, I don't want the AI to write my stories and create images for me so I have time to do laundry and wash dishes. I want AI to basically do the laundry and dishes so I can create. And that's what I think that's what all of us really want, is to let AI technologies do the quote unquote, more menial tasks that are time consuming and repeatable and let us focus on creating. And I think that's what we should be harboring ourselves within.

Fatima Rangwala (18:45) So I think that's a great takeaway. And just to keep our jobs with us and have the basic household chores and routines given up to AI. I think that's right. Swap and switch.

Abby Hehemann (18:59) I'm ready.

Fatima Rangwala (19:03) So am I. I think as a marketer, I would want to save my job and have that creative edge to my day in, day out routine and also tell our teams to have that creative edge because, hey, who wants to lose the creativity and who wants AI to take over us? It's very important and a great point that, I'm glad you brought that up.

Abby. So any significant success story that GetResponse has that you can share with our listeners when applied to SMB, B2C knowledge, probably from a B2B clientele. So there's a massive difference. And how has it influenced your approach to what you do today?

Abby Hehemann (19:46) Sure. Yeah. I think wrapped up in the concept of B2B marketing, B2B sales, B2B SaaS, there's a lot of those pesky assumptions we all think that we know about. It's thinking that everything has to be super, everything has to be white glove, hands-on, bespoke, and you lose track of making some things on demand or more accessible for quote unquote a B2B user. But somebody that's using your product day in, day out, certainly there's times when they're going to want because they've got a large organization, they've got large needs, a lot of custom specificities, let's say, and how they use your product. But they also don't want to have to be blocked and reach out to somebody every time there's an issue. What we take at GetResponse with our kinda B2C arm is to use some level of on-demand education, communication, embedded experiences in the application that help them surface these things on their own and be able to solve some new problems without having to wait for their next touch point with their customer experience manager, for example. That's one thing that I think sometimes with the B2B organizations that so much is left to the bespoke hand holding and waiting for your weekly, monthly, quarterly check-ins to expose new solutions, new capabilities of your solution to the users of that product.

And there's certainly times and places for that. But you should also be finding ways to, similar in some capacities that you do for your B2C clients, help self-service some of your B2B use cases in some scenarios so that they can more regularly find the value in your solution without you having to wait for some one moment in time meeting. That's what we do a lot of, and we've seen a lot of success with that. It's really helped to engage our B2B users much more. We're seeing really nice improvements on some of our customer success-related and retention metrics from our B2B segment. Once we actually started introducing more self-service product marketing and educational content inside the application of our B2B segment.

Fatima Rangwala (21:52) Awesome. That's very true and well said, Abby. It's very fascinating to hear about GetResponse and your role into the company, how you've been managing and scaling up your business. You've been helping teams. It's really been exciting. Any good takeaways for our listeners as we come to the final segment of this conversation and any advice that you would love to give, pain points, recommendations, we are okay with that.

Abby Hehemann (22:22) Sure. I would definitely say stay curious, keep learning. I take, I don't know if you've heard, some folks have heard of Reforge. It's an excellent marketing product development course that's developed. I'm constantly in courses, in different workshops, reading different books because it inspires me and it helps me think of new ways that I can grow and I highly always recommend staying engaged, not just with your current work, your current position, but with your career. You're the only one that can manage your career yourself. Nobody's going to do it for you. So you really do need to invest in yourself and invest in your learning. And then it's really going to be just about stay close with your customers, leverage their insights, surface them to your leadership, keep your product knowledge tight, and use that to your advantage to help you continue to develop your career and help you progress further. The people who know your customers the best often are going to win in any type of business that you're in. It doesn't matter if you're in customer success or product development or marketing. The person who knows the customer the best wins. So that would be my primary recommendation. And invest in yourself and your learning.

Fatima Rangwala (23:35) Absolutely. Well said. Appreciate your input, Abby. Very exciting and very insightful episode. As we wrap up, it's clear there's a wealth of knowledge to absorb and apply to our marketing strategies. There's so many ways to do that. The insights that are shared today are just the beginning, I'm sure, sparking more curiosity to delve deeper into all the evolving landscape of digital marketing and anything happening under the hub. If you're interested, guys, in exploring more about GetResponse and how it can revolutionize your email marketing, you can visit their site. Don't be left in the digital dust, all I can say. It's a great take from Abby. Embrace the changes in email marketing and e-commerce. Apply your strategies and be true to yourself. Save your job. That's all I think we can say. If you'd like to connect with Martech Cube further to learn more about our journey at insights, visit our website and also feel free to reach out on our LinkedIn profile. Thank you for joining us today and happy marketing.

Abby Hehemann (24:39) Thank you.